


Patrick-isms

by fairmanor



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: David Rose Loves Patrick Brewer, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, M/M, Oneshot, Very Light Emotional Hurt/Comfort, missing each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:08:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25886341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: David starts to miss Patrick a little too much while he’s away on a business conference, so he tries to recreate a day in his life to soften the blow.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 16
Kudos: 133





	Patrick-isms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agoodpersonrose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/agoodpersonrose/gifts).



> This is for the lovely justwaiting23, whose favourite tropes inspired this little oneshot! I hope you enjoy :)

On the first day, David is fine.

The morning had gone exactly as he expected. Patrick had woken up a little earlier than David – okay, five hours earlier, at the completely respectable time of 7am – to get ready for his three-day business retreat in Elm Valley.

When David finally wakes up, he notices with a small smile that Patrick has taken the apple danish that David left out for him the night before. He shoots Patrick a quick ‘love you’ text, looks at the calendar, and breathes out.

It’s okay. It’s only three days. He can do this.

He wanders around the kitchen for a bit, texts Patrick again to make sure he actually took the apple danish or put it back in the fridge because that was the last one and David is kind of craving it now, then when he’s had his brunch he gets ready for the rest of the day.

It’s now 5pm. He’s still fine. Everything is fine! He’s hoovered the living room and their bedroom and polished the kitchen counter, cleaned the shower (even those really grotty corners that he always tries to avoid), he’s stuck his head over the garden fence for a chat and accidentally got a face full of cut grass from his neighbor Sadie’s lawn trimmer. Twice. Which means he’s washed his face twice, as well.

With Marcy giving instructions down the phone, David makes sesame sea bass and rice for dinner, because Patrick doesn’t like sesame so he can do what he wants. See? There are benefits to Patrick being away. And he’s fine.

After dinner, he settles himself down on the couch with a glass of white wine and sticks on _Notting Hill_ for the millionth time. It’s a comfort movie, so he doesn’t blame himself too much.

It wasn’t a great day – just a normal one, in the grand scheme of things – but it was fine.

On the second day, David is really really not fine.

His day off is, regrettably, only a day long, which David has always found kind of offensive. So he wakes up to a blaring alarm instead of a kiss to the temple from Patrick, which is always nicer.

He stubs his toe on the way to the bathroom, which he knows wouldn’t have happened if Patrick had already been in there, because he would have waited an appropriate amount of time before making his leisurely way to the bathroom. He always lets Patrick go first, taking his customary five minutes to splash his face with water and assault his teeth in that weirdly aggressive way of brushing that makes David cringe.

He burns his thumb on the coffee machine, because Patrick isn’t there to say “Coffee’s hot, David,” which seems to have replaced “Good morning” these days.

Then he heads off to work, and nothing seems to go right. This always happens when Patrick goes away. Though there’s not a moment in his life where he’s ever taken Patrick for granted, it’s always at times like these when David starts to realize just how much Patrick glues up all the little bits of him that he hasn’t been able to scrape together in any of his 30-none-of-your-damn-business years. He’s like the gold that filled up the cracks in that kintsugi bowl he bought in Japan in 2010. When a customer screams at him for not stocking the same soaps that she gets in her local store in New Brunswick or he break a glass in the kitchen or Rogelio’s has run out of garlic knots when he would really, _really_ like garlic knots, sometimes it feels like Patrick walks around the corner in slow motion, a white light shining behind him with a load of fans making his clearance-rack shirts ripple as he walks.

As if on cue that night, Rogelio’s has not only run out of garlic knots, but they’re not even _delivering._ David throws his phone down onto the couch in a huff, finally admitting to his mushy self that, as usual, he can’t even function if he doesn’t see his husband for a _day._

David digs a portion of Marcy’s lasagna out the freezer and throws Patrick’s dressing gown in the dryer. He grabs a fork, sits himself down on the couch and switches on the TV. He doesn’t even realize what he’s done until he’s sat wearing his husband’s warm, fluffy dressing gown, eating his second mom’s lasagna with one of Patrick’s IPAs in his hand. He tunes into the TV he’s been half-watching.

_A football game? What am I doing?_

He looks around at the way he’s smothered himself in Patrick’s things, laughing incredulously at how much of a disaster he is over this man, but then it gives him an idea. And David thinks it’s a very good idea indeed.

So on the third day, David has a plan.

Patrick has been texting and calling him an acceptable amount and David is more than happy that Patrick is safe and well and ready to return sometime in the middle of the night, but it’s still not enough. So he spent the rest of the night after his little Brewer-filled comfort session writing out a bullet list titled ‘Patrick-isms’. After a year and a half of living in his husband’s pocket, David is pretty confident that he could recreate a whole day of his life.

Patrick-isms

Get up disgustingly early

Stressful skin care?

Blue

Make that joke with Ray about tennis? Not entirely sure, may pass

Call ~~mom and dad~~ Marcy and Clint

Some kind of physical activity (ew)

Cuddle David (impossible)

Fuck David (…not entirely impossible)

When his alarm screams him awake at 7am, David still has every faith that his plan will work. That it would tide him over for the next 24 hours just as though Patrick was here, since it was obvious he literally couldn’t deal with his absence, even at the big age of [CONFIDENTIAL].

David trudges his way to the bathroom in Patrick’s white T shirt and blue sleep pants, even trying his best to mimic the cute little hobble-walk Patrick does to the bathroom when he’s been sleeping in a weird position. _This might just be the hardest part of the day_ , David thinks, as he cups a pool of water into his hands and scrubs it perfunctorily over his face. It hurts. Emotionally, of course. By the time he walks downstairs, he swears he can _hear_ his poor pores screaming. And his teeth, because David tried to recreate Patrick’s concerningly forceful brushing technique and almost scratched his gums off.

He tries to make Patrick’s special pepper and chorizo eggs for breakfast, complete with that wholemeal rye bread they get from the farm on the outskirts of town. But he concludes that Patrick _definitely_ uses witchcraft to make such a glorious concoction, because the eggs burn and crust onto the side of the pan and he adds the peppers too early and the chorizo too late. And when he checks the breadbin he realizes there _is_ no bread, because Patrick always picks it up on his days off.

Okay, so this is harder than he expected.

But it’s fine! He can still try and be Patrick for a day. The blue clothing won’t be hard. He puts on Patrick’s bluest, Target-est shirt and midrange-st, denim-est jeans before rocking up to work earlier than he has in a long time.

He leans behind the desk, trying to act as blasé and confident as possible with the customers. Patrick seems to be able to shift into customer service mode more easily than David. It’s hard to keep a straight face, though, when he wants to claw his face off from the lack of proper skincare that morning.

The morning comes and goes in a flurry of frosty interactions with customers (apparently, David _really_ struggles when he doesn’t plaster on his cheery service smile) and embarrassing conversations with Ray where he tries and fails to discuss the football match he’d stuck on the TV last night. By midday, he’s crabby. He grabs Patrick’s favorite lunch from the Café – a tuna melt, which David restrains himself from accompanying with fries because Patrick would never do that – and flops down in the backroom. David’s always liked the backroom. Even though they live together now, it’s still scattered with little trinkets and scraps of their life together, from photos to the espresso machine they were eventually able to afford to the cushions from David’s old bedding set at the motel. But he’s not there for long, because it takes him literally two minutes to eat the melt. So now he’s crabby and still hungry.

How does Patrick _do_ it? It takes a lot more than David thought to create the man he loves so much.

After calling Marcy, which is the only easy part, David sticks on some Mumford and Sons to try to get him through the rest of the day. It does not. There is only so much banjo one can take, even in the name of love.

Sneakily, David flips the store sign to ‘Closed’ and sets off home, but is still feeling antsy and worked up. He circles around the block a few times before turning back into the town, eventually parking in the grassy car park next to the baseball pitch. Physical activity is one of the last things on the list, but after the day he’s had David is absolutely _not_ about to attempt that. (Even if the day had gone well, David supposes he still would’ve let himself off of that one, as a treat.)

He sits cross-legged on the hood of the car as the sun starts to warm and dip down, creating a pleasant, dusty glow across the baseball pitch. David only wishes it didn’t remind him of the middle of an oven, because he’s really fucking hungry.

He’s about to slide down from the car hood, resigning himself to a night of shitty takeout food and bad reality TV before Patrick inevitably slides into bed in the middle of the night and makes everything okay, when a familiar voice startles him from behind:

“David?”

David tries to make a graceful exit off the car, but ends up jumping hard and rolling onto his ass, just like the last time he was anywhere near this damned baseball pitch. He looks up to see Patrick hurrying over. He’s looking suitably exhausted and frazzled in yesterday’s shirt and smells like cheap hotel soap. Not quite the slow-motion saviour many would expect to be bowled over by, but David would take him over Colin Firth in a wet shirt any day.

“What are you doing here? You weren’t meant to be back until tonight!”

“I got home early and you weren't there, so I've been looking everywhere. More like what are _you_ doing _here,_ David? And wearing my clothes?”

David stands up, brushing the dust off his husband’s jeans. It dawns on him how silly this entire idea was, and he flushes with embarrassment as he gets the whole explanation out.

“I…may have been – missing you. Just a bit. And I thought if I could, um, maybe try and recreate your day, then you’d be a bit closer –”

Patrick cuts him off with a kiss, which they’re both laughing into within seconds.

“Ah yes, because I famously finish all my days by sitting in my work clothes on the hood of the car and…looking at the baseball pitch.”

Patrick leans down to pick up the folded paper that came out of David’s pocket when he fell.

“No, you probably don’t wanna open that, it’s –”

“Patrick-isms,” he reads. “Stressful skin care...b-blue? Blue what, David? Call mom and dad…”

“Ugh stop,” David groans, covering his face with his hands. When he slides a finger to the side to peek at Patrick, he’s making that disgusting heart-eyes face that makes David’s heart do the heart-eyes face.

“David, this is quite possibly the cutest thing you have ever done, ever. And I get to watch you wake up _every morning.”_

“Mmkay, I wouldn’t call grunting in my sleep and writhing like a worm cute, but…”

“Just shut up and come here, David.”

Patrick cups the back of David’s head and kisses him again, more firmly. David’s face is warmed by the setting sun, and he wraps two firm arms around his husband, feeling content again. His gold is back.

“You do that better than I ever could,” David murmurs as they break apart. “I think I’d better leave all the Patricking to you from now on.”

“Hm, I think so. There’s still a couple of things at the end of that list I need to do.”

“While I very much agree, you’re gonna need to make me one of your specials if you want me to even _look_ at you tonight. And we need to have some serious words about your skincare.”

**Author's Note:**

> BTW, if you've never eaten pepper and chorizo eggs, what are you even doing with your life. I tried them once and haven't looked back in three years.


End file.
